There is something that might be of interest
to this group.

You probably know about mingw that allows
small executables that are only dependent
on msvcrt.dll.

I basically have a rival to that with PDPCLIB
and PDOS/386. If you have a C90-compliant
program you can build it against PDPCLIB and
it will work on Windows (from Win95 up) as
well as on PDOS/386.

And you have probably heard of Wine that runs
under Linux and is huge.

Well, I have a rival to Wine that is about 50k
in size that satisfies that limited purpose of
running msvcrt-based executables under Linux -
optionally under a shell to run multiple commands
and do "dir" and some other stuff.

It relies on a consistent calling convention
(cdecl), and does the loading of the executable
which means it has to handle the msvcrt.dll
resolution, and it does this by providing hooks
to the same (PDPCLIB under Linux) CRT, such that
the CRT is called recursively.

The CRT knows the recursion level and does
certain Linux-relevant things on the first
recursion, then switches to Windows for some
minor things (parameters).

I don't have a 64-bit version. This would require
either Linux to be recompiled with MS calling
conventions or some extra glue to switch calling
convention when used to load a 64-bit msvcrt-based
executable.

All available at http://pdos.org - search for
win32lin. And the same thing for OS/2 - win32os2.
Note that OS/2 is commercially supported in the
form of ArcaOS and likely has much better support
than the "free" version of Windows that shipped
with your PC.

BFN. Paul.